Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘flower’

Hand-painted floral gradient time…happy Spring! It certainly feels like it here, we had a truly impressive lightening storm followed by monsoon-level rain. I spent a large portion of my evening just staring out the window in a dark room!

Anyway, it is also new polish time! This is three coats of Little Oysters by Ethereal Lacquer. This was a limited time buy (from one of the custom groups I am a part of) and I love it! I am actually wearing it (again) as I write this. The polish itself is a bit thick, however it is very opaque and I probably could have gotten away with two coats! It is a greyed-out pastel lilac with copious pink shimmer that shifts to yellow-gold at sharp angles. It looks grey, purple, pink, and sometimes yellow.

I decided I wanted to replicate some of the cool designs I had seen online with this particular stamp, but using purple rather than a multi-color gradient. In retrospect it would have been much easier to actually do a gradient, rather than hand-painting each layer of petals directly on the stamper head! But the end result is pretty cool.

YOU GUYS. This polish is amazing. And I quite like the design I ended up with as well! I am drooling over my own photos. This is rare.

The polish here is called Grey Opal by Polished for Days. It is yet another excellent example of why everyone should join the Polish Pickup Pack! Grey Opal covered perfectly in two thin coats, and control of the polish was excellent. Honestly, I have been painting my nails for years and even so I almost always need to clean around my cuticles with acetone after I am done applying my base color. With this polish, I had no need…it went exactly and ONLY where I wanted it to go! I am impressed.

The polish has a grey jelly base with lots of silver shards, coral shifting flakies, and teal shifting flakies. It is very fun to look at, between the orange and the teal and the glitter! It somehow manages to be both fun and elegant. I loved this polish so much I ended up checking out the Polished for Days store and OMG it is amazing. I want most of it (many of the polishes seem to have as much depth to them as this one, which is just incredible) and I officially have a new indie polish crush for jelly/flakie/shard combos!

Anyway, I ended up making floral stamping decals using a coral polish that more or less matched the pink-orange shade of the flakies, and just going with it. I did paint in some green leaves, but they barely ever made it onto the nail (they were all off the edge, oops)! I want to say this is fitting because yesterday was the first day of spring…but it is 32 degrees out and snowing!

Flower day in the 31 Day Challenge was easy for me to pick…this has a whole bunch of flowers! It’s also quite old (I painted this back in spring and its almost the end of summer…whoops!). I also think its cute, if a little grandmother-y.

The design was inspired by this bit of nail art which is not watermarked so I have no idea who it belongs to! Nor where it came from at all. But it is pretty so I went with it!

I don’t know that I would have decided to mix flowers + color change + dots if left to my own devices…this mani is really busy! It works because so many of the colors are in the pale-neutral shades I think.

I had NO idea what to name this. Red flowers? Golden blooms? I give up. Red polish with shiny gold stamping decals. In vaguely flowery patterns. Voila.

The new polish here is Rosebower by A England. I have wanted more A England polishes for years, but they are always just a bit too expensive! Rosebower is one of the ones I have had my eyes on, and in March it was on sale at color4nails, so I had to get it! It is sadly less holo than I was expecting, but is a beautiful pink-toned red shimmer/metallic with subtle holo. It is also almost a one-coater! I am a fan.

Using my new Uber Chic mat (I had a good day at color4nails :-p) I made some gold and black stamping decals using one of the Bundle Monster Shangri-La plates. I have been wanting to color them in for ages! My lines were not the cleanest, but not too bad.

I do love the red+gold paring though! And I swear I loved it before Iron Man was a thing :-p

Well, this was a total fail. I am posting it anyway. I was inspired by the guest post that Paulina’s Passions did over at Lucy’s Stash to try and create a soft floral half moon mani for the “half moon” day in the 31 Day Challenge. Note: it didn’t work.

I started with a base of Jaded by Serum No 5. This is another of the polishes I picked up in the Llarowe closing sale. I was hoping for a little stronger teal/jade, but this polish is mostly a silver holo with a subtle green tint. That being said, it is a one-coater and super easy to work with. So, not exactly what I wanted but I like it anyway, and it was $4 so win/win!

After Jaded was dry, everything went belly-up. I painted in a half-moon with light pink, but I should have used a paler shade (or went with a nude). Then I started adding tiny roses, but they were in teal and so blended in too well with the small green leaves I added after. Then came the dots, which I pulled out of a KBShimmer glitter polish. Now they look like floral Daleks (from Doctor Who). My boyfriend almost doubled over laughing at the “easter daleks” and declared them NOT a fail.

Day 2: Orange! Turns out an orange daisy is a gerbera daisy. Now you know!

This is a similar design to one I did in 2014, found . Only, I messed up that design and painted the flower over the wrong color diagonal!

So, now I have it right…a diagonal of orange polishes with the flower growing out from it. I wanted to make each flower slightly different (aka put the petals in different places) but I now wish I hadn’t. Oops!

Floral nails for Monday! Or something. I saw this really cute design over at The Nailasaurus and just had to modify it for my slightly longer nails…and using this awesome neon green called Shock!

Shock is a really fun color (…if you like greens, which I of course do), a super bright green with a scattering of holographic glitter! It covers beautifully in two coats, and application is a dream. I love me bright greens!

The design was hand-painted with white, pink, yellow, and orange nail polish. White first (the petals), then a yellow center with orange (I used a coarse sponge to blend them randomly), then the pink highlights on the petals.

The design at the tip of my nails came about because my nail just didn’t look colorful enough! All the lines were free-handed, so I’m actually rather pleased with how nicely they came out. And of course dots…because I just have to add dots to any manicure.

I’ve switched to using Sugar Cube by Salon Perfect rather than Snow me White by Sinful Colors just because my Snow me White has dried up (I still use it for stamping) and both polishes work fairly well. Once this bottle is used up I’ll almost certainly go back to Sinful Colors just because it’s convenient!

If you want to get this vibrant green on your nails, head over the Mentality website! Shock (and the rest of the neon holos) are $6.75 each. I am embarrassed to say that I haven’t finished swatching all 11 of the neon holos and I already have the next batch of polishes (and HOLY COW are they awesome) to work with! Eep! This is what happens when my right hand has nails so short I feel bad swatching on them…

When I first got the neon holo line of polishes from Mentality, I could not stop thinking about how great these 5 colors looked in a line! They were so pretty I took photos of the bottles all arranged! Thus, I knew I just had to do some ombre nail art with them.

All of them are so pretty! In the bottle I thought Drama looked the best, but on me I think I prefer Startle and Alarm. The flowers were free-handed with white polish (Sinful Colors – Snow me White) and gold-painted rhinestones were added at the end.

The idea was to have the flower blooming larger on each nail from pinky to pointer. I do like that the flower takes over more of the nail each time!

In the sun these colors REALLY flashed glittery and neon. My camera freaked out! I love it 😀

Each polish will get its on post coming up, but if you are as enamored of these polishes as I am/was/will be, you can get them at the Mentality shop for $6.75 each. Enjoy!

Apparently, yesterday was Earth Day. What with the Zoya sale, I really should have known! Thus, I probably should have posted these nails yesterday. Regardless, today you get green earthy floral nails!

My base coat is another beauty from the neon holographic line by Mentality called Frenzy. This green is a real neon, which is to say it is insanely bright and freaked out my camera and I love it!

Frenzy covered well in two coats, had wonderful control and was very easy to remove. The color is a bright lime yellow-green (very similar to The More The Merrier by Essie, but with holo!). The holo in this polish is not super bright, but is certainly visible in the sunlight.

The design was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the bright spring green…flowers and leaves in a weird sprout pattern! I figured it would somehow go well with the curve of my nail. I finally cut the nails down to more-or-less squovals this evening, so sometime next week you guys should be back to seeing non-curves! Phew.

While wandering randomly through ULTA, I found a whole section of polish on 75% off sale. To be fair, all the polishes were in itsy bitsy bottles, but they were also under a dollar. Honestly, many of them were either very thick (from having never been closed properly I presume) or the pigment had separated spectacularly. One of them caught my eye though…a pink glass fleck glitter. So, voila!

The base is Passionate by PIXEL…a brand I have never heard of. The bottle is tiny (smaller than anything I have other than China Glaze minis) but the color is actually nice! This is two thin coats of Passionate. It reminds me of a lighter pink version of Allegra by Zoya (which is actually why I bought it).

The design was inspired by Dressed up Digits, who took a Born Pretty Store stamp that I happen to own and colored in the flowers! I ran with the idea and did pink and purple holo flowers using a whole bunch of Nabi polishes. I will say that the stamp works great! This is my second of three purple flower manis, the last will be next week. I told you I was doing a flower thing!

I’m not much sure what to say about this mani. Its…interesting I suppose? I painted most of my nails with Blast by Mentality, and picked up a pink I almost never use that contrasted nicely with the shimmer in Blast. Only…there is totally a reason I never use that color and I had no idea what design to do once I was done! So here :-p

Blast is a very pretty greenish-blue (more green than blue) matte polish with copious amounts of purply-pink glass flecks that shift to orange-pink! This polish took three thin coats to cover, but was very easy to work with. As with the other polishes from this line, I recommend wearing peel-off base coat to make removal easier!

I left Blast as she was (aka no top coat at all) and she still dried down nicely. Don’t ask me about the rest of the design…I decided to try the dandelion stamp from Bundle Monster plate 615 and then make the seeds blow away…only the stems didn’t come out well and the seed look a tad bit silly. Also, my pink polish (Poppy by Revlon) bubbles no matter what I do! That, dear ladies, is why I never wear it.

Despite the oddness of this mani, I promise Blast is really pretty! The shimmer makes me happy 🙂 If you want to pick up Blast, she is $8.25 at the Mentality shop! I also promise that tomorrow and Friday’s manis will be a bit more involved and less bubbly :-p

And now for a DRAMATIC change of pace…stamping done beautifully! This mani was incredibly simple and looked fantastic, if I do say so myself 🙂

I started with a base of Monet’s Garden by Emily de Molly. The last time I showed this polish was over Christmas, and I did NOT do it justice (darn lighting in the bathroom at my parent’s house) so here it is again, in its glowy teal glory. Monet’s Garden is a crazy mix of glitter (red, purple, light green, dark green, holo bits) in a green-tinged teal base. Shown here is three coats (the top coat just because MORE GLITTER, not because I needed it). The glitter payoff is incredible, they are well-suspended and you don’t have to dig at all.

I then made a stamping decal using Bundle Monster plate 616, and coloring in the petals with gold polish. The center of the flower was first painted with black and white glitter polish, and then covered over in gold. The whole thing was trimmed and placed on my nail. AND IT LOOKED AWESOME!

This mani was almost a wonderful success…until it wasn’t. The plan was to make a diagonal gradient from white to orange, and then turn it into a daisy-like flower. All went well, until I put the center of the daisy on the wrong diagonal!

My thumb came out how I intended (the black center is opposite the darkest part of the orange) but on ALL my other fingers I did it wrong. I noticed two nails in and had to decide if I wanted to switch it, but I figured it would look even goofier if two nails were right and two nails were wrong. Anyway. Maybe I’ll try this again with the proper placement of the center of the flower.

I should probably do some more floral nail art. It is the summer after all! Even if it was (gloriously) in the 60’s rather than 90’s this past weekend!

Enjoy!

***Other news: I am (yet again) entered in a nail art contest over at Nail Polish Canada. I would be very much obliged if you clicked this link, scrolled to the bottom, and voted for ‘flightofwhimsy’ if you haven’t already! Thank you! 🙂 ***

What could be better than purple, gold, and flowers? Nothing! …Unless you really can’t paint flowers, and I can’t paint flowers.

I saw this really intriguing pin on pinterest and traced it back to miawrrr, of blue polish with gold glitter painted over with flowers. I decided to try it myself, but I made a fatal error: I tried one-stroke.

The base polish here is Plum Tuckered Out by KBShimmer. It is a beautiful deep eggplant purple with deep blue and magenta glitter hidden in the jelly base. I wasn’t quite prepared for how thin this polish is (it really is a jelly) and it required 3 rather thick coats to be opaque. That being said, this polish is gorgeous! I love the deep hidden glitter, and I’m a sucker for purple polish anyway.

I knew I wanted to try one-stroke calla lilies, similar to what I had seen on Lucy’s Stash a few months ago. But I also knew that I didn’t want to try to paint 5 of them, so on my non accent nails I just went heavier with the glitter! I really like the gold glitter over the purple base. A small part of me wishes I had just left them like this!

The lilies…well…right. I tried for white and pink, using only polish. I really need to acquire myself some acrylics and a better paint brush (I did these with my clean-up brush). These are a total failure. I can fake one-stroke well enough, I think I’ll just stick to that from now on rather than trying the real thing. *Shrug*

I hope you enjoyed, even if my foray into one-stroke didn’t work! If you want to buy yourself some gold (and other) glitter, check it out at the Born Pretty Store! Don’t forget to use my 10% discount code, LY5X31.